By Noimot Olayiwola/Staff Reporter


Hussin and other delegates at the workshop
Qatar will be among the first countries in the world to produce a National Health Accounts (NHA) report with the newly launched classifications called the System of Health Accounts 2011.
The NHA report, which will be the second such report by Qatar, is expected to be published by September this year.
“We have completed the data collection and analysis phase and we are in the last stage of revising the second report,” the SCH Health Economics manager Altijani Hussin told mediapersons on the sidelines of the System of Health Accounts 2011 (SHA 2011) capacity building workshop, which began yesterday.
Qatar issued its first NHA report in June last year, which was the first of its kind in the region and this was followed by the launch of the SHA 2011 created by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Health Organisation (WHO) as well as Eurostat.
The Supreme Council of Health had earlier this year adopted the new classifications based on its fundamental belief that decision making should be based on evidence-based measures as the policy-makers and stakeholders will have a more precise description of the role of the health sector within the national economy.
The new classifications provide a refined conceptual framework for health accounting and an extended set of classifications to describe the flow of funds within the health system.
While the SHA 2011 provides more advanced methodologies to measure and evaluate the health expenditures, the NHA was a set of accounts that describe all expenditure flows within the health sector, both governmental and non-governmental.
NHA aims to trace the flow of health spending and resource allocation within the health sector.
According to the NHA published in 2011, Qatar had spent over QR9.5bn on healthcare in 2010 thus becoming a top per capita healthcare spender in the region and its expenditure is expected to climb further in subsequent years due to government’s commitment to providing quality healthcare to the populace, Hussin maintained.
The capacity building workshop was being held by the SCH in conjunction with the WHO.
Representatives of some 10 countries from the region are attending the workshop, which aims to enhance their knowledge of the new classification system.
The capacity training is being envisaged as a milestone in transitioning to SHA 2011 by all the regional countries, so that the region can use the newly revised classifications.
The workshop is being attended by participants from 10 regional countries namely: Oman, Bahrain, Jordan, Egypt, Palestine, Tunisia, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Lebanon as well as Qatar.